Model citizen

Sunday

Feb 17, 2013 at 12:01 AM

Michael D. Abernethy / Times-News

Out of active military service and back on U.S. soil for years, Yancey Christopher remained troubled by his experiences in Baghdad. In 2004 he completed a 16-month tour that included a year in Iraq as a member of the 422nd Civil Affairs Battalion, with the Army Reserve. His team lost several men and more were wounded by gunfire or explosions. By 2009 he was enduring strings of anxious, sleepless nights. Close proximity to several blasts led to increasing difficulty with his cognition and hand-eye coordination. Growing up in Haw River, he’d packed away his glue and paint sets in favor of girls and rock music. At 43, he turned to his childhood hobby for therapy. “It was helpful in a few ways,” Christopher, now 46, said. “It made me work with my hands. It was also helpful having to plan something all the way through and use schematics to build things. It also helped pass the time and keep my mind off of things.” Last month, his helpful hobby paid off in other ways. His exactingly detailed, 1:200-scale model of the USS Arizona swept the top awards at the Chattanooga ModelCon. He left Tennessee on Jan. 13 with prizes for Judges’ Best in Show, Chairman’s Choice, People’s Choice and Best Ship for the Arizona. His Mercury Space Capsule took Best Space Subject. He picked up another five gold medals in the competition, which judged more than 400 entries from all across the U.S. In an email, the Chattanooga Scale Modelers President Lynn Petty called Christopher’s ship the “big hit” of the annual show, praising the research and effort obvious in the rendering of the Arizona. “I was extremely surprised. I’m still relatively new at this,” Christopher said. “I’m still looking for my niche, but it might be ships.”

WELCOME TO “YANCEYVILLE.” Up a flight of steps lined with memorabilia and press clippings from his time in Iraq, including an Iraqi flag he recovered and was photographed with for a feature in the April 19, 2003, edition of The Military Times, is Christopher’s workshop. He and his friends call it “Yanceyville,” a play on his first name. The walls are lined with diecast NASCAR autos, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin posters and, above, Blackbeard’s menacing flag featuring a devil skeleton spearing a heart. Several shelves and a desk are stacked with bits of metal and plastic, paints, brushes, knives, scissors, wires, bobby pins, paper clips and even a few surgical tools. “These are the tools of the trade. Everything is pointed or sharp,” he said. If you think modeling is easy — just pulling plastic pieces out of a box, snapping them together and slinging some paint on them — Christopher’s work elevates it to an art form. At a desk with a high-powered lamp and a pair of jeweler’s glasses is where he spent 11 months researching and detailing the Arizona. The historic battleship was bombed and sank during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Every detail is precise and as historically accurate as he could make it. Tiny planes on the ship’s deck are complete with cockpits and seatbelts inside. Dozens of crisscrossed, interwoven threads make up the rigging. Inside the ship’s button-sized search lights, he painted mirrors that catch and reflect light. He drilled breeches in the 5-inch guns, where soldiers would have loaded shells. Even the ship’s paint is to scale, a flat black and gray that appears lighter from farther away and aged with salt-gray streaks between the boards on the hull. He used six shades of brown and tan on the deck, giving the illusion of thousands of tiny, interlocking boards the size of mouse teeth. He spends between one and three hours a night on his projects. He suffers from “advanced modeler’s syndrome,” the condition of not being content with building a model from the kit without additions or alterations. When he jumped back into modeling, Christopher built a 1:350-scale model of the USS North Carolina. It took second and third places at his first show in 2011, RDUCon. He’s submitted models at about 10 shows since. “This is a solitary hobby, so getting people together who do this is really something neat,” he said. This spring, he’ll retire the North Carolina and donate it to the Haw River Historical Museum. “I don’t think it’s fair to keep on entering the same ones once they’ve won,” he said.

CHRISTOPHER SPENDS HIS days as a deputy with the Alamance County Sheriff’s Office and a superior court bailiff. The bailiff’s job is to be a courtroom referee. “It’s a balance between being objective and having empathy or sympathy for the victims,” he said. “I look at it as a well-officiated football game. If no one’s talking about the referees, it’s a good game.”

His memories of Iraq, its people and the lives lost there are never far. He wears a black band on his right wrist with the name and dates of a friend killed in action. His unit was one of the first inside Baghdad in 2003. He recalled the fear of traveling into the city, where they expected to be gassed and exposed to biological weapons. Once inside, his battalion took on many roles. They rebuilt and stabilized schools and banks and helped restore sections of the city’s failing sewer system. They sought out the missing and abducted. On any given day, he could be a firefighter, a peacekeeper, a friend or a trained killer. It’s obvious which of those roles he preferred. During his deployment, he took several thousand photos, many of smiling, laughing children befriended in inner-city Baghdad: a series of two young, laughing girls with striking, hazel eyes; a boy with half a mauled banana inside his giggling mouth; a crowd of children around him, smiling and hugging him. “If it wasn’t for the kids, I don’t think I would have made it over there,” he said, matter-of-factly. He praises his wife of 15 years, Janelle, with bringing him through it and holding things together at home while he was away. “People just don’t realize how much military wives do. They are the unsung heroes,” he said. In their home, east of Bellemont, the Christophers rescue animals from puppy mills and abusive situations. They currently have a Sheltie, “Nemo,” and a Yorkie, “Lucy,” and have taken in a stray, black cat that “found us.” Christopher is active with Models for Troops, an organization that supplies active-duty and retired soldiers with modeling supplies. He also is the president of the International Plastic Modelers Society’s George Preddy Club, a group that meets the first Thursday of each month at Hobby Town in Greensboro.